


Unraveling Reality

by mumuinc



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 6: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Dark Mark, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Inception - Freeform, Legilimency, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, weird-ass sex change spells
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:54:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23892643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumuinc/pseuds/mumuinc
Summary: To be Marked by the Dark Lord is an exultation of all that is Pure, and Magical, and Dark. It is also a most exquisite torture that the weak of heart cannot hope to survive with their sanity intact. To see that sniveling child, Draco Malfoy, honored with the Mark was a blasphemy, to Bellatrix's discerning senses.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know if I'm even finishing this, or if this was all I wanted to write about this. I set out to write an Inception-inspired fanfic on Bellatrix using Legilimency, and now I guess I'm writing just another Drarry story. Because I can. I have no idea what comes after this chapter, since I haven't written anything in years, but I needed to get this story out of my system; I've dreamt about it often enough that if I don't post, I'm going to maybe slowly go crazy.

Narcissa’s child was a brat. This much, Bellatrix had surmised when she first laid eyes on the scion of the Malfoy fortune as the child and his mother had walked up the long pathway from the ornate manor gates when Draco first returned from Hogwarts. He had nothing of the aristocratic regal air of the Blacks, unsurprising given that Narcissa had always had the air of a delicate flower that turned towards the sunshine that Lucius had been to her life. A pity, really, now that Draco was all that was left of the male line of the Blacks. Draco was a soft child that yielded far too easily to his mother’s doting, and likely to his father’s as well. None of the spine, the unbending, unyielding force of will that Bellatrix or Regulus, or even that Muggle filth-loving Sirius, had had. Draco, to her, was too much like Lucius, too infatuated with the false stature of his name, far too convinced of his own invincibility, and far too weak in his loyalty to the Dark Lord. That had been Lucius’ downfall, fancying himself the Dark Lord’s right hand man, his lieutenant.

Bellatrix had scoffed to herself as she had watched Narcissa break the news of Lucius’ incarceration in Azkaban to her son. Little weakling.

She had been utterly surprised when, upon the Dark Lord’s return many moons later, he had deigned to allow the young Malfoy to be entered into the Lord’s service. Bellatrix had almost laughed, if the gesture would not have been misconstrued as insubordination by her Lord. It would not do to show her second-guessing the Dark Lord’s intentions, not when the vacuum of Lucius’ absence was still so keenly felt in the gathering of Death Eaters at Malfoy Manor’s dining hall, and oh, it was an absence that Bellatrix was willing to kill for to fill. 

She could feel Rowle’s avarice, Snape’s desperation, Nott’s expectation, that any of the three of them would be chosen. They would be wrong, of course. Not one of them had been there save Wormtail, during the Dark Lord’s years of exile, long years during which Bellatrix had sat in Azkaban and plotted and fed the fanatical loyalty within her heart. _She_ would be chosen. Not those sniveling, miserable turncoats who had returned back to the Dark Lord’s fold only when he had returned to power. 

Bellatrix certainly would have, had she not been haunted daily by the dementors guarding Azkaban. She knew not how that filthy blood traitor cousin of hers had managed his escape from the wizarding prison two years ago, but Bellatrix had not spent her years in Azkaban in futile waiting. Oh she and Rodolphus and Rabastan had exerted their hardest, but they had never so much as stepped a foot outside the cold, filthy, horror box that had been their prison in the past fourteen years. No matter now, though, for now she was free, thanks in no small part to the mercy and grace of her Dark Lord, and now it was high time for her to repay her debt, to prove the depths of her loyalty to her Lord. 

And as the Dark Lord called forth the little Malfoy child to bestow his exalted favor upon his worthless, skinny hide, Bellatrix began to formulate a plan.

She could see, as the Dark Lord turned his wand to young Malfoy’s left arm, the look of sheer and utter terror in Narcissa’s face. Perhaps there was some way to twist this to her advantage. She would never allow this sniveling child now crying and writhing as the Dark Lord imprinted his most revered of Marks to fill that gaping absence that Lucius had left. That seat belonged to a Black, for the pureness of her blood, and it belonged to a Lestrange for her unbending loyalty to the cause. Bellatrix Black Lestrange was the only one deserving of the seat at the Dark Lord’s right.

The Malfoy lordling’s screams echoed, unending. Cissa had turned her head away from the sight of her child as they boy’s body twisted in agony. There were tears in the delicate corners of her eyes. Many of the other Death Eaters, ones who had never seen the interior of the soul-sucking coldness of an Azkaban cell, had turned away as well, or in Snape’s case, had averted his eyes, likely put off in reminder of another little boy who had deigned to join the Death Eaters, only to due of mysterious circumstances none could explain. Perhaps the memory of Regulus tugged at Bellatrix as well. Her cousin had been the same age as young Malfoy now, but Regulus, because he was a Black, had weathered the agony of Marking with greater dignity.

Draco was a weakling.

But perhaps, Bellatrix thought as she toyed with her favorite knife, the one she had stolen from Sirius when they had been children, the one she had used to torment Cissa and Andy endlessly as an adolescent, the one Cissa had kept in foolish sentimentality when Bellatrix had been shipped off to Azkaban, Draco was a weakling she could use, one she could manipulate far easier, and far more thoroughly than an Imperius curse could to turn the tide in the Dark Lord’s favor. 

She would need to think on this, perhaps a tad sight further than just ordering the boy about. Cissa had, in the intervening time when her son had arrived and before the Dark Lord had made his presence known, requested her assistance in teaching the bratling a bit of Occlumency to help the child protect himself from the Dark Lord. Why, Bellatrix could not fathom, when it should have been the whelp’s utmost pleasure to have been possessed in mind, body and spirit by the glory that was the Dark Lord. Cissa had been adamant, and Bellatrix had acquiesced. She was not a complete monster; Bellatrix loved her sister. Her love did not extend to this poncy little shade that was Lucius’ young clone.

But oh, Draco was a natural. Perhaps it was the Black blood that still flowed in his veins no matter how thin, that natural predisposition to secrecy, that lent a flair for Occlumency. 

She watched as the child’s screams turned hoarse and dry and finally petered out into nothing as he lost consciousness at the Dark Lord’s feet. A pitiable excuse for a Death Eater, this child would be. But no matter. He would be useful. Bellatrix would make sure he would lead the Death Eaters and their exalted Dark Lord into glory, perhaps even beyond the Dark Lord’s pronouncement of the whelp’s mission to kill Albus Dumbledore.

#

Draco was still in pain.

It was unyielding, unending. It had no beginning, and it felt that the excruciating agony had no end. He could not know whether a minute or a day had passed since the Dark Lord had taken his wand to Draco’s skin for the pain which had started on his left forearm had bloomed like a sickening flower of doom and exploded agony that hit every nerve-ending, oozed through every pore, and plugged through ever orifice until he could not know where the pain ended and his own existence began. The only mark of the passage of time was his dim awareness of his mother crying, of the Dark Lord laughing as he pronounced Draco’s grand mission to the table of his most loyal followers, of the Death Eaters who heard this pronouncement laugh derisively, the awful sounds echoing endlessly, tonelessly in his eardrums until he thought he was going to go mad if he wasn’t already from the pain that just continued to radiate now from his core into ever fiber of his very being.

Dimly, he felt motion, voices around him. He was no longer aware, for awareness meant recognition. Now, he was only sensate—what motion contributed to the pain, what sound sharpened the agony, what flavor tested of hate. There were words flung around him, muffled cries that sounded pitiable and pathetic and if he were not yet past the point of cognizance, he would have known that to be his mother. There were screams of his incompetence, of his weakness. Sounds of begging, of acquiescence, the feeling of hands prying his jaws, which had locked closed to grind his teeth against the torture, open, liquid that tasted like bile slithering down his throat. A woman shouted and screamed, and then something shoved against the side of his head and a voice that told him, 

“Let’s see what horrors and beauty the Dark Mark has opened for you, little dragon!”

#

The aftermath of a Marking had always been one of Bellatrix’s favorite pastimes in the years before Azkaban. Perhaps only subjecting those filthy swine-like Muggles and their blood traitor protectors to the most exquisite of tortures, the Cruciatus, perhaps, or a variation of the Organ-Rupturing curse that Rabastan had perfected to use on lesser beings like werewolves that got in the way of their rampage, had been quite as satisfying, and naturally, only because those spells would have come directly from Bellatrix’s wand. But the spasms of unending torment that crawled through the skin of the newly Marked sent such a thrill up her spine in a way that only a spell devised by the Dark Lord could manage.

That it was Lucius’ pathetic little whelp that was now writhing first on the polished tiled floors of the Manor’s dining room, and now in the silken sheets of the boy’s bedroom was a delight that Bellatrix would treasure.

It was a pity Narcissa could not appreciate that her boy’s pain went on only insofar as he had not accepted the Dark Lord’s dominion over him, mind, body and soul. It told Bellatrix of the boy’s weakness, the lack of strength of his convictions to take on the burdens and sins of his useless father. 

Narcissa knelt by the bed, her tears still spilling when she should have long past accepted that this was the way of the Dark Lord, the way of blood purity. Bellatrix knew. Cygnus and Druella Black had drilled it into her as a child, in a way they had never done with Andromeda and with their precious youngest, Narcissa. But Bellatrix, she was the oldest, the strongest of the Black sisters. Cygnus and Druella had no sons, had made no precautions to have sons; they would not see the propagation of the family name of the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black. And so, they trained their daughter.

Purity of blood, purity of magic, purity of desire. _That_ was only attained through acceptance of the pain, through complete and utter devotion. Before the Dark Lord, Bellatrix had worshipped her father. Her education into the ways of the Black family had been fraught with lessons in pain that taught her how to withstand and accept the loyalty, the fealty that it commanded. When she had taken the Dark Mark, the pain had been but a fleeting wash of the Dark Lord’s will and power, cleansing her of any prior commitments, prior entanglements, prior loyalties. She committed herself to him before the Mark, in the way her father had taught her, and that had been what had spared her.

Presently, the doors to Draco’s rooms flew open and in swooped Severus Snape. Bellatrix would have thrown the man out, but Narcissa seemed to have been expecting him.

“Please, Severus! It has been hours! I don’t know how long he will be able to stand this pain before he starts to lose his mind!” 

Bellatrix wished her sister would not debase herself to beg for this half-blood’s favor. Severus may be a Death Eater, but he was no more deserving of Narcissa’s regard than a filthy homeless mutt of a crup. 

Severus did not look in the least as if he would be able to assist, although Bellatrix could have told her sister that. He took the boy’s hand from Narcissa’s grip, timed the jump of his pulse, and then felt for his temperature on the clammy skin of his forehead.

“He is rapidly descending into delirium,” he announced. “I can try to ease the worst of his suffering, but…”

Narcissa let out a sob. “But…?” 

Severus hesitated, and turned to Bellatrix. “You and I both know what must be done, what Draco must do to end this.”

Bellatrix sneered. Her knife was in her hand and she toyed with her tongue idly on the blade as she lounged carelessly on the divan by the long French windows. “It is the boy’s choice, Snape. I will not rush such a hallowed consecration with such crass things as mercy.”

“You condemn the boy into madness,” Severus said quietly. He sighed, the fingers of his hand not holding Draco’s wrist twitching as it hovered above Narcissa’s head, as if he itched to touch her hair, perhaps in commiseration, perhaps something else. 

Bellatrix eyed him suspiciously but the hand never touched Narcissa, who continued to weep by the side of the bed, uncaring that the crushed velvet of her dress crumpled around her in the most unseemly manner. She watched as Severus procured a potion, likely one he believed would aid in the recovery from the Cruciatus, perhaps something that would ease the firing of the pain receptors in the nerves, and then slowly, but methodically prised Draco’s mouth open and emptied the vial into his mouth.

They waited the span of ten heartbeats, loud thudding pulses of blood in veins, but the writhing the did not ease, and the silence is punctuated with Draco’s pitiful moans and Narcissa sniffling into her son’s hand, soft words, almost unintelligible, spilling from her quivering lips.

“Please, Bella, please help him,” she cried, quite desperately this time, looking up with tear-filled, red-rimmed eyes, and Bellatrix finally allows the idea that had been churning slowly in the back of her mind to slowly come to fruition.

She smiled, beatifically almost, rising out of the divan and pocketing the knife, swapping it out for her wand. She thought quickly, calculating the time they had now until the summer ended and the boy went back to Hogwarts, and the small smile blooms into a beam of triumph.

“All right, Cissa,” she crooned, as she elbowed Severus from where he stood by her sister. Slowly, she allowed herself to pet her sister’s hair in a paroxysm of sympathy as she drew her up and slowly released her into Severus’ care before returning her attention to the boy on the bed. “I’ll help your boy. You need not worry. He needs but a nudge in the right direction to accept the Dark Lord into his mind as he has in his body.”

Draco’s eyes were screwed shut as his mouth opened in a silent scream that spilled only a ragged breath. Bellatrix smiled again as she slapped his face until his eyes flew open, the Malfoy grey irises vacant, pupils but pinpricks of fathoms deep blackness.

“Let’s see what horrors and beauty the Dark Mark has opened for you, little dragon! _Legilimens!_ ”

#

If pressed, at some point in her life, Bellatrix would probably have admitted that entering the mind of a teenage boy was not the most convenient of setups, nor was it the most pleasant of experiences, but she had resolved to herself a means to secure that coveted position as the Dark Lord’s chosen, and though everyone knew her a cruel and heartless creature, Bellatrix retained some affection for her sister. Narcissa had been the one person who had known her best, and though the years Bellatrix had spent in Azkaban had cooled that sisterly devotion, she had no desire to destroy that connection. At least, not in the moment. Helping her boy and planting the suggestion for the boy to help her was only mutually beneficial.

She only wished it was not such a distasteful experience.

Draco, while an intelligent, precocious child, if Lucius were to be believed, was still a boy, and he was still sixteen, and Bellatrix realized as the swirl of thought and memory enveloped her, that she had absolutely no desire to relive the boy’s life. There was nothing in the memories of a callow, self-absorbed, weak-willed boy that interested her.

She watched as he relived memories of the boy as a young child, surrounded by mountains of wizarding toys, the best only that Galleons could buy. There was something odd to the quality of the memories that flitted past, as though they were run through a strange, distorting filter. It left the memories, the images, really, washed out, tinged with an odd flavor she couldn’t quite place, and it was a most curious thing, as Bellatrix, like the rest of her sisters, was not only accomplished and learned as a Legilimens. They were naturals, a gift from the Rosier line of her family, that her blood traitor cousin and his weakling of a brother had not inherited. It was the oddest occurrence that she could not see any of these memories as anything more than grainy stilted moving images, when her skill and talent with the art was unrivaled, as if they were true but somehow… not.

There had been little precedent to this. Even as a teenager, Bellatrix had relished in her innate skill for Legilimency by practicing on her peers, and later, once she’d refined her intrusions, on her family. Father and mother had been too adept at controlling their thoughts, and Andromeda and Narcissa had long since learned that avoiding their sister’s penchant for cruel play meant that they also had to learn to shut her out of their brains, a feat Andromeda relished and one Narcissa learned out of necessity of survival in a Black family home. But her cousins though, they were prime targets. Bellatrix recalled easily how young Malfoy reminded her outwardly almost of a blond and shining young Regulus, strapping and proud, but ultimately a sniveling wretch. In his mind though, the feel of young Malfoy’s thought and memory reminded her of Sirius. The strange flickering, the washed out quality of his thoughts, like a still life that had been ruined by turpentine… Bellatrix remember a throwaway comment her mother had made once, of her sister-in-law, when that awful woman had first been with child:

“Walburga is so desperate for supremacy in the family she would sacrifice her own child’s health for a son.”

Bellatrix had wondered what it meant, why Healers had been banned from the Grimmauld Place home in the time that Sirius had been born, and hadn’t understood until Rodolphus had thrust the spell in her face shortly after they had married. She hadn’t the faintest interest in carrying an offspring and the magic had been so dark and vicious that she’d relished the hours-long torture she’d subjected her new husband to until he’d acquiesced to her wishes that he would never subject her or any child they would make with the same spell. And when she’d let the Cruciatus go, she’d Obliviated him of any trace of that spell in his memory, so that he would never learn the secret of how Orion and Walburga Black’s first child had actually been a daughter, that the Black family may never have been capable of producing a son by any natural means, perhaps not until Regulus was born some years after the disaster that was Sirius.

She pondered this as she watched the images flit by - here a flash of young Malfoy’s first train ride to Hogwarts, an image of the boy meeting Harry Potter and his Muggle-loving friends, there another flash of the boy lounging in the Slytherin common room, surrounded by his minions and lackeys, two hulking boys that Bellatrix realized were the sons of Crabbe and Goyle. It wasn’t difficult to deduce their parentage as they had the same vacuous expressions of stupidity that their fathers wore around the table with the Dark Lord. She scoffed as these little wannabe Death Eaters whined about Potter in their whinging high-pitched little boy voices. Were she of the sentimental sort, she would have even found their inane chatter of getting a leg up Potter and his detestable friends charming. 

She discarded the memory as useless, and hurriedly grasped around the swirl for more, something that tethered the boy to the present, to his Marking, so she could fulfill that damnable request Narcissa had made of her, and then she would be free to root through the deepest recesses of this boy’s mind to plant the desire there, that idea of being close to Potter, so he could eventually swindle that inconvenient little nobody to come face his doom at the end of Bellatrix’s wand.

For that was what true Legilimency was. Oh certainly, the naturally gifted but untrained would hear the incessant jabbering of stray thoughts of whoever was close by. That had been Stella Goldstein’s air of mystery and drama, if Bellatrix bothered to recall her own Hogwarts days. It was a bothersome gift to the untrained mind, and Bellatrix would not be surprised if this precise gift that was the bane and boon of Druella Rosier Black’s children that would eventually cause Andromeda to betray her most noble legacy and blaspheme herself by consorting with a Mudblood. Bellatrix was surprised, however, that Narcissa had managed to work around her gift with surprising aptitude. She had always pegged her youngest sister as the weakest one, and the sight of her sniveling on the floor, clutching her boy’s hand did nothing to improve this ingrained belief. Of course, if Cissa had had the level of training that Cygnus Black had reserved for his eldest daughter, then there would be no sniveling in the first place. 

Legilimency was a difficult skill to master. The untalented could learn, perhaps at the most, to read thoughts, emotions. Masterfully accomplished Legilimens could rifle through memories such as what Bellatrix was doing now. But the true mark of mastery married with the inborn noblesse of natural talent was the ability to plant an idea so deep in another human being’s mind, that the idea takes root, like a weed growing among roses. Left unchecked, undetected, and unrealized, the weed would take root and ultimate destroy the rose bush, the idea would never be learned to have come from another person’s suggestion, and it would bloom into a most unholy obsession. It was truly the most insidious, masterful means of gaining control, not only of another person’s will, but of his entire reason for being.

Bellatrix knew even the strongest Imperius curse could be thrown. The Death Eaters had seen this happen, not one year ago, when Potter resisted the Dark Lord’s will. But this, the planting of a thought, an idea, a desire, so deep in another person’s psyche that they believe in it to be true to their own self… this was true power. Once she ended this spell, Draco Malfoy would be nothing more than a puppet to her will, and _that_ was the start of the true glory she would bring the Dark Lord.

First though, she needed to see, to understand this strange shift she could feel, could taste, but could not comprehend, in young Malfoy’s mind.

She watched as the swirl of memories sped past her clutching hands, the lazy drift speeding into a gale, and then a maelstrom, as the boy’s pain intensified, and threatened to cloud her concentration. This would not do. Malfoy was a sniveling weakling who could withstand little in the way of pain. A pity, really, when pain was the best of teachers.

The memories continued to slither and writhe past her, faster and faster. It was almost as if they had their own awareness of the alienness of her existence among them. She knew this. Her mother had taught her to stand as a reed and move with the rolling waves of thought and emotion until she was one with that maelstrom, undetected, unknown.

It was an effort to reign in her desire to speed up this farce and crush the boy’s paltry defenses under the heel of her own will. She was the strong one, the indomitable one. Draco Malfoy was but a marionette to the machinations of the Dark Lord, and it would be so easy to brew her own storm in his mind and let that consume him into madness. But that was not what she was here for.

And so she loosened control, eased the rigidity of her will and allowed the memories to weave and swoop and rage. She would find it, that one memory she needed, and she would use it, bend it and mold it to her will until Draco could not distinguish her will from his own, and then she would let it drop into the ocean of his thoughts and let her plan unfold.

She did not count on the fact that the boy’s pain coupled with the strange block she felt as she entered his mind, the one that caused the images that swirled around her to stutter and blur, the one that reminded her of the boy’s strange likeness and kinship with her cousins, would sharpen from formless slivers to brittle, unyielding, unforgiving icicles. 

Had she not been in the grip of her own spell-casting, she would have screamed.

#

The afternoon was warm and pleasant, the sun streaming through light, gauzy drapes and painting hazy shapes of warm gold on the polished redwood floors of what Bellatrix recognized was the West Wing solar of Malfoy Manor. Narcissa sat pleasantly at the cream-colored divan, her pale fingers poised delicately on the handle of a tiny teacup. The smile she wore, though also pleasant like the mildness of the Wiltshire weather, was guarded as she eyed the dark-haired, snub-nosed witch sat across from her, also handling the fine china with the same delicate posturing that Bellatrix expected of all Pureblood wives. 

If Bellatrix had to hazard a guess she would not have expected that Marguerite Yaxley to be a Malfoy associate. The Yaxleys were Purebloods, but Lucius had always struck her as self-serving in a manner that did not advance the supremacy of Purebloods so much as it advanced the standing of the Malfoys, whether in riches or in political standing. The Yaxleys were an old and moneyed family, but nothing approaching the the fortunes of the Blacks, the Lestranges, or even the Potters. Marguerite had been Bellatrix’s age and if memory served, the woman had gone on to a forgettable career in paper-pushing in the Ministry’s Improper Use of Magic office after Hogwarts. That she was here in Narcissa’s private solar peaked Bellatrix’s interest, though she had already figured that she would have no need of this particular memory from the Malfoy boy. It certainly didn’t advance any of her private interests.

Marguerite set her teacup down, the motion nothing quite so delicate as Narcissa’s movements, and when she spoke, it was easy to find that certain flatness of tongue and accent that differentiated the society elite from the riffraff. And the Yaxleys most certainly did not belong to the former.

“Perhaps Lucius may be interested in our vineyards in Sicily,” Marguerite was saying presently. Bellatrix could see her posture sharpen from the measured, delicate movements of a Pureblood wife into that of an eager saleswoman driving a hard bargain, and scoffed. This was why the Blacks had never associated with the nouveau riche, and it was evident in the slight crease in Narcissa’s blond eyebrows that her sister thought the same.

“Sicily,” Narcissa said softly in that demure manner that meant she was moderately impressed. “Why, is this a new acquisition of Philip, then?”

Ah, Philip Parkinson. That explained the smell of new money dripping off Marguerite’s ill-matched brocade robes. Bellatrix had not known that the Yaxleys had married into the Parkinsons, and that would explain now why Lucius and Narcissa would even bother hosting their audience. The Parkinsons, though not as extensively landed and noble as the Blacks, or as well-connected as the Malfoys, were nonetheless rich and held a good deal of power, maybe not in England, but certainly within the French Ministry. Why this audience would be with Narcissa as opposed to Lucius was not immediately clear until two small children burst through the arched hallway that led from the solar to a connected sitting room,. What looked to be a five-year-old, gap-toothed and chubby little Lucius Malfoy trotted in with ruddy cheeks, snot in his mouth and woeful, teary grey eyes. He was followed in by another small child, dark-haired and plain-looking, her unruly hair twisted in a messy braid and looking quite like an Abraxan’s tail the one time Bellatrix had spied the littlest Malfoy emerge from the stables having evidently groomed his horse on his own.

“Mother!” Draco wailed as he ran for his mother’s skirts and clutched with grabby hands at the crushed velvet. “Pansy refuses to let me play with her dolls!”

Narcissa cooed and fussed over her son, pulling the boy gently to sit beside her on the divan, even as her eyes sharpened as she regarded Marguerite and her ugly little child, who clutching the aforementioned dolls to her chest like a coveted treasure. Marguerite let loose a chagrined smile.

“Draco, I’m sure Pansy did not mean to be selfish with her toys,” Marguerite ventured. Her hand on her daughter’s arm tightened reproachfully, as if she was too afraid to discipline her ugly toad of a daughter in front of Narcissa.

“I wasn’t selfish!” the little girl exclaimed indignantly. “Boys should not play with dolls anyway, Draco! Father says it’s not normal!”

Narcissa stood, affronted. “I should say not, child. Are you insinuating that my son is anything less than perfect?” She arched a brow imperiously at Marguerite. “Is this the kind of education I should expect from a prospective match for Draco?”

Ah, so this was what it was. Bellatrix had seen her share of parents fielding prospective matches for their sons, though in her time, her parents had been the one fielding suitors for their daughters. They were, after all, the scions of the Ancient and Most Noble House of Black, the one family in all of the Sacred Twenty-Eight that retained the purest of wizard blood. Bellatrix herself had been thirteen though, when Corvin Lestrange brought his sons for Cygnus and Druella Black to peruse and inspect for suitability for their eldest daughter. Even Sirius had been eleven when Walburga first entertained the dual match for Alecto Carrow to Sirius, and Amycus to Andromeda (matches Bellatrix was certain would have brought her rebellious cousin and sister alike to heel had Walburga managed to actually pull it off before Andromeda eloped with her Mudblood of a husband, and Sirius absconded for the Potters.) Draco was five, and a snot-nosed child would have little understanding or appreciation of parents matching him to such an ugly little girl.

Marguerite stammered through an apology. “Perhaps Draco may enjoy Pansy’s company better with Theodore, Vincent and Gregory in the company as well?”

“I don’t _want_ to play with Theo, Mother,” Draco whined, still clutching hard at Narcissa’s voluminous skirts. “He pulls my hair!”

That should not have been unexpected, Bellatrix sniggered to herself. The littlest Malfoy, and he was certainly very little such that even Pansy Parkinson was taller than him, had the shiniest mane of white blond hair that put even Narcissa’s well-coiffed locks to shame. Draco, for all that he was pointy and snot-nosed, was a comely little boy, with a delicate face that had not yet morphed into Lucius’ severe features. He reminded Bellatrix uncomfortably of how Sirius had looked when that traitorous little devil had been a child, so innocent-faced and beautiful that boys and men had slavered after him far more than the women had lusted.

Narcissa did not look amused in the slightest, though whether from her son’s whinging or Marguerite’s oblique reminder that Draco’s childish interests lay more in playing with girls of his age than with boys, Bellatrix could not be certain. “I should think not if those hooligans will only aggravate my son.” She was too polite to sniff disdainfully, but her tone was crisp when she added, “I think we’ve had enough for the afternoon, don’t you think so, Draco?” Her expression didn’t change as she glared imperiously at Marguerite and her spawn.

Bellatrix had already lost interest as Marguerite stammered a response and farewell and took herself and her child away. This was nothing that was remotely useful to her, but even as she tried to rip out of the memory, the warm summer afternoon seemed to root her in it and refused to swirl away no matter how she attempted to manipulate the scene into another, and she could feel the first spark of the annoyance with which she had allowed the scene to unfold before her kindle into a simmering rage.

The Narcissa in the memory sank back into her chair and procured a monogrammed silken handkerchief from the folds of her robes and gently wiped her son’s tears lovingly. “Hush now, Draco, they are gone.”

Draco raised his shining eyes with tears still threatening to overflow to his mother’s face. “I don’t like her mother, I don’t want to marry her!”

Narcissa cooed in that way that only mothers did with their favored children. “Of course not, my angel. Philip and his brood are hardly the right match for the blueness of the blood that flows in your veins. Why, I’ve heard tell that his daughters hardly exhibited any signs of magic until they were five! The shame and horror!”

Draco let out a watery giggle, not completely at odds with the cherubic features of his girlish face. The tone he adopted, while reedy from his previous bawling, was smug. “She is a cow, I’ve had my magic since I was two, father said so.”

“Before that even, my love. A Black would have exhibited magic before he is even born, as is our birthright, and you are no exception.”

Bellatrix wanted to scoff at the saccharine scene before her; of course Narcissa would convince Lucius’ spawn of the noble blood that ran in his veins. Of course, now that Sirius and Regulus were dead, Draco would be the last male Black descendant of their line. A pity, truly, that he had to be the son of that slippery snake, Lucius, but altogether not unwelcome, when it was clear the boy was indoctrinated in the supremacy of their purest of magical blood.

The slow fading of the memory back into the ethers filled her with relief, but as she attempted to grasp forward into the scene of the the present day’s afternoon when young Malfoy took the Mark, she instead found herself hurtled into a different memory. And that was when her rage felt the first trickle of insidious dread.

#

It seemed neverending. Bellatrix wanted to rage and tear through the fabric of memory and thought so she could stop wasting her time stumbling through inane memories of Draco Malfoy growing up from a passably attractive child into an annoying, whinging limpet of a boy who clung to his mother’s skirts, and spouted his father’s rhetoric. At five years old, Draco was a snot-nosed, crying toddler who wanted to play with his friends’ dolls, instead of playacting at dueling. At six, he was a smartly dressed child with a mischievous streak, stealing into his mother’s dressing room to play alone with his mother’s feminine things. At seven, he was a devious child convincing his father to bring him on play-dates while Lucius spent time at the Ministry, and Draco would watch in starry-eyed infatuation at the Aurors that bustled through the Ministry foyer. On and on it went, the life and times of Narcissa’s insipid and quite obviously gay little child. Bellatrix would have been almost revolted if she had not known that Draco had probably been conceived a girl and born a boy only through the darkest of magics that his father had performed on the fetus in Narcissa’s womb.

How her sister could have agreed to this abomination, she would never understand. The Sex-Change spell performed on a recently birthed child such as what had happened to Sirius was terrifying enough in its darkness, that even Bellatrix would not attempt it. To do it on an unborn child… perhaps Lucius truly did have the stomach for the Dark Arts, although to practice it on his child—a Pureblood, no less!—was a travesty.

She drifted from memory to memory, trapped in the boy’s head by the torture he felt over his Marking and unable to rip forwards by the magic of Lucius’ spell. It swirled around her like an endless stream of inane drivel, until she found herself standing in the middle of Lucius’ study. Draco paced the room anxiously. He was wearing his Hogwarts robes, the cut of his hair and the beginnings of a more angular look to his face suggested the cusp of manhood that meant this was a memory of not so long ago, perhaps Yule, or even summer of the previous year, when summer of the previous year, when Wormtail had succeeded in resurrecting the Dark Lord.

Lucius was sat behind the giant mahogany desk of his study, his expression only mildly exasperated as Draco worked himself into a frothing rage over Potter’s entry into the TriWizard Cup. Ah, Easter of the previous year then. Bellatrix had only made herself passingly familiar of the events that had led to Potter’s capture in Little Hangleton, the details were hardly inspiring of any admiration on her part for the engineer of the Boy Who Lived’s capture. Bellatrix held no recognition for Crouch’s masterplan. It was inconvenient at best, and shoddy at the worst, and had led them to the escape of Potter from the Dark Lord’s clutches, not to mention Crouch’s own untimely demise, a waste of a loyal, if small-minded, follower to the Dark Lord.

Presently, Draco whirled from where he had been throwing his tantrum by grabbing random items from the mantelpiece over the fireplace and throwing each one at the floor to punctuate each yell of frustration over Potter, to face his father. His face was flushed with anger, the sneer he wore on his face morphed into an expression of impotent rage.

“Why, father, must I stand by to let him win? You’ve never stopped me getting in Potter’s way before!” Draco’s voice cracked embarrassingly in places and squeaked in others, a sure sign of puberty encroaching. 

Lucius merely stared at his son mildly. “Let it alone, Draco. There are things afoot that not even I wish to stand in the way of. Nothing good will come of you getting in Dumbledore’s way to favor his champion. You know that better than I.”

“But it’s infuriating! Diggory is abominably a Hufflepuff, but Potter—!”

Lucius nodded lazily. “Yes, yes, I’ve heard this before, Draco. ‘Potter is a no-good, speccy git with his annoying green eyes, and what not.’ Do you hear yourself, sometimes?”

The sudden, abrupt change in the boy’s expression piqued Bellatrix’s interest. In all of the boy’s memories, Draco had been nothing but contemptuous and hateful in his small-minded little ways whenever the subject of Potter came up since he started at Hogwarts. But this, this was a gem. The cagey, hunted look that entered the boy’s grey eyes was something Bellatrix had not seen before.

“I—I never said anything about his eyes,” Draco muttered sulkily. “You should have seen what he was like at the Yule Ball, all smug and—and dashing and—ugh!”

Bellatrix laughed to herself. Dashing? It seemed ickle Draco had a little crush. Oh but this is going to be glorious! she thought to herself as her plan took the shape of a confused boy unable to deal with the effects of his true nature warring with his father’s spell. Perhaps there was something there for her to work with on Draco after all.

Lucius seemed unmoved, and quite obviously done with dealing with his son’s frustrated ranting. “Cissa!” Narcissa appeared at the door to the study, her expression indulgent as she gazed besottedly at her husband and son, the same face on two sides of a Galleon. “This was _your_ idea, before he was born. Deal with it!”

The memory swirled before Bellatrix could see more, but it was enough. She had the ammunition. Now she only needed a way out, but it seemed, Draco’s mind was not to provide her a convenient one as everything seemed to swirl even more madly than before. The static, halting mess that had been Draco’s memories flowing through immaterial time seemed to storm around her. This time, she was no longer going to be a reed. This time, she was done. This time, she was going to play god.

In the magic of thought, memory and emotion, there was little in the way of tangible anchors for an interloper such as herself to dig and pull to stop the maelstrom, but Draco was weak, and Bellatrix knew enough of Draco’s magical core to find it, that seed of Lucius’ spell, of Narcissa’s desire for a child, of fabric of Draco’s very existence. She needed only to rip the foundations that the spell had laid sixteen odd years ago, and she would break free of the boy’s mind. But needs must first.

Boys, she knew, from her own experiences in adolescence, and dealing with abhorrent little creatures like Sirius, and Regulus and Rabastan, felt little that was stronger than anger. Draco had that anger at Potter in spades, Bellatrix could tell. Perhaps not enough to kill the boy, and in truth, Draco Malfoy looked about as willing to put paid his hatred of Potter as he was to acknowledge his rampant homosexuality, a fact Bellatrix did not care enough to exploit, so convinced was she of its link to the Sex Change Spell and a detail so inconsequential it did not even warrant her attention, until the boy’s unwitting admittance to his sorry, unfortunate infatuation with the Brat Who Lived. _That_ , more than anything, was what she would use. And oh, how convenient it was for Lucius’ spell, like a perfect recipe for disaster.

Slowly, carefully, she gathered the shimmering strands of though and memory, a delicate spun silver thread that she twined carefully around her fingers. She tested them carefully, that the strands she picked corresponded to that part of Draco’s unconscious, that deep well-spring of formless, unidentified desires that made one a person. Here, she picked that tiny, fearful, utterly abashed admission on Draco’s part of his shameful attraction to Potter. Slowly, she used the nails of her magic and planted the spark of her magic. It was little more than a sprinkle of golden desire, inconsequential like Draco Malfoy’s life in the grand scheme of the Dark Lord’s plan, but it was a difficult piece of magic that took a lot out of Bellatrix, if nothing else but that she had difficulty conjuring an emotion from the wellspring of her own core that had little attachment with her own malice and devotion to the Dark Lord, but she managed, and it was only a speck she needed, and that was what she planted.

And because Draco already had that desire hidden, deep-seated within his own core, it took little for Bellatrix to weave the speck of her conjured desire with Draco’s own, until the gold of her hers was indistinguishable from the silver of Draco’s, a sunspot in the burning core of Malfoy’s magic. Over time, that sunspot would grow and dampen Draco’s own desires and take over until he was nothing more than the embodiment of the desire, the _idea_ that Bellatrix planted within him, a dwarfed sun, diminished in his own capacity, with little will but to follow that which Bellatrix has planted within him.

Darkly delighted with her own work and gleefully anticipating the mayhem she could wreak across the embodiment of opposition to the Dark Lord, she let go of the reigns of Draco’s unconscious. Now it was time to rip the root of what trapped her in Draco Malfoy’s waking nightmare.

Lucius’ spell twisted in Draco’s core. Once upon a time, it may have existed peacefully in Draco’s life. There had been no indication in Draco’s memories that he was ever plagued adversely by the spell. If anything, Lucius may have had the better idea than Aunt Walburga had done with Sirius, casting the spell on an unborn child. Draco was neither a blood traitor, nor an abomination of wizarding kind. Perhaps there may have been something to be said of his latent homosexuality, but that has never been unheard of within the Black family, never spoken of to be certain, but if Alphard Black was any indication, certainly not shunned.

Now, though, the Dark Mark’s magic had wrapped around the spell. Bellatrix could see the Mark’s magic hooked around Draco’s core, which was shaped by the spell, and the hooks ran deep. Draco’s core bled his pain and magic, and loathe as Bellatrix was to help Lucius’ spawn, she had made her promises to Narcissa, and she needed Draco, if not at his prime, then mostly well and alive, to execute her grand plan. 

It ripped her heart apart, the part of her that had dedicated her entire being into service of the Dark Lord, but she needed Draco. She took the claws of her own magic and held the Dark Mark twisted with Lucius’ spell and held it in her hands, as though it were a precious gem beyond all estimation… and then she clenched her hands and pushed.

* * *


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are a few direct quotes lifted from Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince for the scenes in the train and in Borgin and Burke. Although the story has changed, there are things that haven't, not really, between Harry and Draco, especially, that the book quotes made a whole lot more sense than if I rewrote with entirely different dialogue.

Draco didn’t want to go back to Hogwarts. No, scratch that. He didn’t want to leave the manor; he didn’t even want to step a single foot outside of his own bedroom.

His mother told him this would be the new normal. There was no going back to _before_. Father was in Azkaban, and in no position to help him in any way, and Mother and he were stuck here. The Manor had always been home, a mansion of delights to a spoiled boy, and a headstrong young man, and Mother and Father had always defended this sanctuary from the vagaries of a world of shifting loyalties. That changed with the arrival of the Dark Lord.

Draco had always thought that Father’s allegiances had been for the greater glory of magic and wizardkind, and Father was very good at the games he needed to play to always come out on top. Draco had learned those games and played them with his peers. But the game had changed significantly when one late summer night after fourth year, Draco spied his father in his study, talking to and ultimately bowing before a stranger whose power rolled off in tantalizing waves that rooted Draco to the spot at the door, where he crouched and tried to remain hidden. 

It wasn’t long after that the stranger moved into the Manor and he was finally first acquainted with the Dark Lord. Physically, he was revolting to behold, and Draco, being a child of indulgence, despised the ugly and unseemly with a passion that nearly broke his resolve when the Dark Lord sent for him not long after Lucius went to Azkaban. For the entirety of fifth year, he’d avoided being present in their Lord’s meetings, but that day, the day he’d been given his Mark, had been the turning point.

Everything was wrong, and terrible, a grave mistake. _Everything_ , including Draco himself.

There was no fixing it, his mother had told him. The new normal. He would have to live with it, his Aunt Bellatrix had said, not with her mouth, but in his mind, for her mouth had been disfigured so thoroughly by the viciousness of his mother’s attack on his aunt, an attack he had not witnessed, but learned only snatches of in overheard conversation, when his aunt and his mother talked over his bed, while they thought he was sleeping. Aunt Bella was still recovering. Mother had put the house elves to work to undo the damage done in the wizard’s duel that had resulted after Aunt Bella had gone into his mind to help him recover from his Marking.

_Help_ may have been a misnomer. Aunt Bella had undone the Mark completely. His left arm was pale and smooth and undamaged completely. But that was all that had been left undamaged of himself after the ordeal. Whatever she had done, and Draco had no recollection of it, had changed him so completely, so thoroughly, that he despaired he would ever be right again. 

But he was awake now, and Mother had stated, after getting herself nearly completely offed by her own sister, that perhaps this would be for the best, for now anyway. Draco was unMarked, and the Dark Lord would ever be so displeased to learn this, but Draco would not have to be back in his presence until the Dark Lord found it time to collect on the task he had set for Draco. Aunt Bella had told him she would manage the unMarking, and she _had_ done so, even though it had been at his mother’s wandpoint. Narcissa Malfoy’s fury knew no bounds at the grave and terrible injustice done to her son, but she had been magnanimous at Aunt Bella’s acquiescence. Draco was almost glad.

If only he wasn’t stuck like this, stuck here, a prisoner within his own body, one he rejected, one he would probably never truly learn to live with.

He turned away from the view of the sky lightening to morning to stare down at his hands. Before the start of summer, he’d admired that his hands were deft and delicate, but belied strength and power of a boy growing into a young man. That was gone now. Now he was only delicate. Like a snowflake that was going to melt once the sun rose. The growth spurt he had been anticipating was never going to happen any longer, and he was still an inch shy of his mother’s height. He’d hoped that at the cusp of manhood, his features would harden into the icy masculinity of his father’s face. That was gone too. 

He avoided mirrors now, since he woke from the strange, excruciating coma that had befallen him after his Marking. He could not stand to look at his face. To say nothing of the sight of his own body when he had gone into his bath… a true horror, worse than a Wizarding Britain overrun by Mudbloods.

Mother had not been so crass as to invade his privacy when he’d screamed and screamed when he was first confronted with the evidence of the change, the _abomination_ of it, but she had sent him Mipsy, to calm him down, to finish washing him, to teach him about this strange new body he inhabited, would inhabit for maybe the rest of his foreseeable future, but Draco had not wanted to be touched by anyone, by anything, least of all a house elf. This was not who he was. He wasn’t…

He stopped, and clenched his hands. No, objectively there was nothing _truly_ wrong with what he was. Objectively, he _knew_ somehow that while his body had changed, he, the essence of him that inhabited this mortal coil, remained the same. Objectively, he was still Draco Malfoy, scion to the massively wealthy and powerful Malfoy line. Objectively, nothing had changed. His Aunt Bella had been optimistically sarcastic when she told him nothing needed to change. No one needed to know. That had been when mother had launched the _Expulso_ so powerful on her face, that it had been six days and the effects of the spell had still not been fully reversed, even with the elves helping to heal her.

He was still Draco Malfoy. But he no longer _appeared_ as Draco Malfoy. Draco Malfoy, the boy, had been his father’s mirror. Looking at himself had been like a glimpse into what a young Lucius Malfoy had looked like.

If he deigned to look up and into the mirror that sat innocuously at the dresser near his bed, the face that looked back now still bore the trademark sneer, the pointiness and paleness that had been his father’s features. He still had hair so pale, it made him look transparent. But everything else was gone: the angle of his jaw, the flat thin shape of his mouth, the shadow of muscle growing beneath his skin.

Mother told him he reminded her of her own mother, from whence she had gotten the delicateness of her own features. Aunt Bella told him he looked like Sirius Black, before Great Aunt Walburga cast her spell. Mother had almost killed Aunt Bella then, for what reason other than that his cousin had looked like a madman upon being sent to Azkaban, Draco would probably never know. Draco had feared and despaired for the nearly insane glint her blue eyes had taken as she gripped her wand, but Aunt Bella had blithely ignored her in favor of pushing back the long silken tresses that draped across Draco’s much narrower shoulders now. She’d helped him cut his hair back into how he had worn it before the end of fifth year. It had given him back some semblance of normalcy, that he could open his mouth and breathe his thanks, without bursting into tears. That was another unfortunate side effect. Mother told him it was hormones. Aunt Bella told him it was a weakness he should be rid of before he returned to Hogwarts. Mother hadn’t attacked Aunt Bella anymore, but her robes caught fire anyway just as she swept out of his room.

Mother had cried and apologized and cried some more, over and over, night after night. She stayed by his bedside daily, and left him only when she could tell he could bear her sadness no longer. Draco didn’t know why she was apologizing, this…. _Thing_ … he had about him now had nothing to do with her, but he could take a fairly educated guess at the unsubtle barbed quips Aunt Bella let loose whenever Mother was around. The spell had been Mother’s intention. Father may have waved the wand and muttered the incantation, but Narcissa Malfoy was the one who wanted a son, and not a daughter.

He no longer started when the door swept open. He knew there were _others_ who waltzed in and out of the manor now that the head of household was out of the way and indisposed, and had left only his underaged son and his wife to manage the estate. He knew the Dark Lord held his meetings in the dining hall, and that the Death Eaters drank his father’s liquor in the drawing room as they bided their time. Mother had warned him to keep away. Aunt Bella had told him if he deigned to make an appearance, it would be most enjoyable, and Draco was not interested in finding out what his aunt found enjoyable, not in the slightest, so he had stayed in his rooms and let Mother and the house elves ward off the others who may deign to wander in to find out for themselves what had happened to Lucius’ son. He’d been petrified of anyone seeing him at first, but when he’d tried to sneak out on his own and found the wards prevented even _him_ from leaving his rooms, he’d stopped worrying. No one else would find him and he was fine with that.

But now summer was coming to a close, and he would have to return to Hogwarts soon. Worse still, he would have to make his way around Diagon Alley to obtain the supplies and books he would need for sixth year. Not for the first time, he considered what would happen if he didn’t return.

He had his O.W.L.S. Malfoys didn’t need to work. That should be enough.

_And then what?_ Aunt Bella had asked him snidely when he’d told his mother that he wouldn’t go back to Hogwarts. _You’ll hole up in your ivory tower and never reemerge? I had never thought a Malfoy could be so cowardly as to shrink like a violet from the inevitability of his fate. Or have you forgotten your mission?_

Aunt Bella had found herself on the wrong side of the door to his room after that and unable to reenter even by force, and Mother hadn’t even had to raise her wand.

“You can’t hide forever, Draco,” that was his mother now, as she entered his room, her robes a dark maroon, the color of drying blood, as she walked uptown him and fussed with the collar of his robes.“As loathe as I am to admit, but Bellatrix is right. There’s no escaping the Dark Lord when he should ask why you do nothing to advance our cause.”

_Our cause_ , his mother called it. Draco wasn’t too sure that he wanted advancing of any cause, the way that he was now. He wasn’t sure there was anything he _could_ do to advance any cause. He was in a body that rebelled against his true nature. It was unnatural. And it made him weak. He couldn’t think of any way that would keep _anyone_ from school from noticing what had changed. He could see it every time he caught glimpses of himself in the mirror he now had covered up. He could smell it on himself even, especially when he undressed in the bath. It was more mortifying than any words could describe.

“I don’t care if the Dark Lord kills me now,” he said tonelessly, even as he submitted himself to his mother’s ministrations all the same.

“You will cease saying such nonsense in my presence now,” his mother ordered in a hiss that Draco had never once in his life heard before. “The Dark Lord will not harm a single hair on your body, if it is the last thing I ever do.”

Draco had no response. He felt nothing but the paralyzing fear of being discovered. He wanted nothing more than to remain in his room, his _ivory tower_ , and wallow in the shame of what he had become. He would have gladly accepted death if it meant he would die in the body he had been born in, and not this strange bundle of flesh and bones with… parts and organs… he would never understand. But he could do nothing to defend himself against the strength of Mother’s will. He had never had to and so he had never learned.

He regretted it every moment that he spent allowing his mother to lead him out of his rooms to Apparate to Diagon Alley, and continue conducting their business as if nothing had changed, when his world had crashed so soundly around his ears. If he had not been so preoccupied with his own fears of seeming even a hair out of place of what a Malfoy heir would have been, he would have noticed that no one paid them any mind. There were no second glances or strange looks, and the only off-putting comment that made his skin itch had been Madam Malkin’s offhand concern that he hadn’t hit his growth spurt like the rest of his year mates that had been by to get fitted with new robes. His mother wasso offended though, that she turned her nose up and beckoned Draco out of the robe shop to take their business elsewhere.

Draco was only partly relieved that wearing the loosest robes he owned was enough to keep a robe shopkeeper’s hands and measuring tape off his body, to keep them from the truth.

“Twillfit and Tatting’s shall be gratified for our business,” Mother said as they moved to the more upscale shop, and the obsequious salesman who greeted them proved her right.

There were no hands or measuring tapes that floated around Draco when Mother imperiously told the shopkeeper that he would keep his hands to himself and find Draco robes in exacting measurements that Draco knew had to be his mother’s and not his own. In any case, it was not as if it mattered. They were about the same height now, and if Draco took enough time to evaluate his new body, he would have easily agreed that he was built now less like Lucius Malfoy, and more like Bellatrix Black.

The reminder of his aunt brought Draco back to the beginning of this waking nightmare: the Mark, his mission.

The glamour on his arm was convincing enough. Aunt Bella’s magic was weakened after Mother’s attacks on her, but she was masterful where the Dark Mark was concerned. And now, Draco had to play his part. His mother may scoff at the notion of him fulfilling his mission, and she may threaten to end the world with the Dark Lord in it if Draco was ever compelled, but in truth, Draco did not need any compelling. He _would_ fulfill his mission, because he needed to prove to the Dark Lord that he was worthy, in the hopes that this would then be enough for him to send his Death Eaters to free Lucius from Azkaban, the same way he had done to free the Lestranges and their cohorts.

He waited until his mother was busy with her own robe fittings before he slinked out of the shop. Knockturn Alley beckoned, and Draco had his own plans of how he would fulfill his mission.

#

Harry had seen him at Madam Malkin’s, though with Ginny and Hermione within earshot in the fitting rooms, he’d thought it wise not to confront Malfoy or his mother when they’d insulted Madam Malkin so thoroughly before flouncing out of the robe shop. He hadn’t forgotten what an evil, conniving pest Malfoy was to Harry’s very existence, not after how he had gloated, first over his Prefect position, and then over the Inquisitorial Squad the previous year, but he found something markedly different about Malfoy now that his rational mind couldn’t define.

He was up to something, Harry decided, although rationally, he’d never known Malfoy to never be up to something. 

He watched, from the corner of his eye, as Malfoy exited Twillfit and Tatting’s alone. His eyes darted suspiciously at the sparse milling of strangers hurriedly going about their shopping. His shoulders were hunched in, tense and stiff, and so unlike Malfoy, Harry almost did a double take.

Definitely up to something. Malfoy looked nothing like himself, with his hooded eyes that spoke more of unease and fear than the usual disdain he held for what he considered rabble that was beneath his dignity to associate with, the lack of that distinctive swagger that marked Draco and his father so easily. He was diffident, fearful, like he fully expected all the people bustling around their mundane lives to suddenly turn and attack him. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that his father was now languishing in prison, or perhaps the stain that fact had bestowed on their good name, Harry neither cared nor wanted to know why. Mostly, he wanted to much up to Malfoy and beat him to a pulp, in full retaliation for his association with his father and Bellatrix Lestrange. For their part on Sirius’ death.

He’d told Dumbledore he was dealing with his grief, but truly, he wasn’t. He was never going to be fine, never going to recover from the loss of his godfather, whom he had come to love, in the short time he had known him, as well as a child loving his father. Harry had expended the more explosive part of his grief in Dumbledore’s office, immediately in the aftermath of the Battle at the Department of Mysteries, but that didn’t mean his anger was gone. He was angry with Bellatrix estrange, and Voldemort, with Dumbledore and the world at large, Malfoy included and probably foremost, but most of all, he was angry with himself, for falling for Voldemort’s gambit, for failing to master Occlumency when Dumbledore had warned him, and most of all, for being the direct cause of Sirius being gone, and he wanted to rage every time the memory of him falling into the Veil surfaced from the most ordinary of things.

In truth, he wanted to turn on his feet and kill Malfoy where he stood, but Harry knew the impulse was fleeting. It would make no one happy and would never give him back what he had lost. Still, that didn’t mean he couldn’t be unhealthily suspicious of what Malfoy was up to.

He listened only half-heartedly with the chatter of his friends around him as he tracked Malfoy attempting an air of nonchalance as he headed in the direction of Knockturn Alley. Losing his escort of Order members and his friends to find out what Malfoy was up to was not easy, but thankfully, they’d moved to the twins’ shop, and the busy shelves made it easy for Harry to slip his Invisibility Cloak out of his bag and shroud it over himself.

He only had to wait a moment before he could slip out the door when an unsuspecting customer wandered in, but by this time, Malfoy had disappeared from the street.

Harry trailed after in the direction he’d last seen Malfoy going, making sure he’d wrapped the Cloak around himself securely. He’d grown so much over the summer that the Cloak barely covered him up to his heels now, and he had to manage a sort of squat-walk, sidling at the edges of the street to keep out of anyone’s way. He supposed that was one of the things he’d noticed when he spotted Malfoy. Malfoy had always been taller than Harry, but when they’d spotted each other outside Twillfit and Tatting’s, Harry was sure he was now easily half a head taler than Malfoy, and that inexplicably made him feel really good about himself. Now there was one more thing he could lord over Malfoy when the other boy had always gloatingly made fun of everything Harry lacked.

He spotted a flash of pale hair and Harry sped up into a trot, darting through the door of Borgin and Burke’s directly behind Malfoy, but careful not to touch the other boy in case he realized he was being followed.

The shop looked no different than the time Harry had once seen Malfoy with his father in it, with shelves cluttered with all manner of dark and wondrous artifacts that had once drawn his curious eye. Malfoy made his way through the shop, each step punctuated by a confident click of his fancy shoes. Harry followed a respectable distance, careful not to bump into any of the displays, before situating himself at a corner of the shop where he would easily be out of the way of the burly shopkeeper that bustled out of a backroom, scowl painted over his gnarled face as he barked at Malfoy, who had been reaching out to touch a display of a glittering necklace laden with emeralds larger than the size of Harry’s fist.

“That’s more than what your father’s line of credit can draw even here, boy,” Borgin declared smugly, just as Malfoy quickly snatched his pale hand away from the display. “You’d not want to touch that, on pain of your life flashing before your eyes, if you know what I mean.”

From his vantage point, Harry could not fully see Malfoy’s face, just the thin, pointed line of his nose, somehow more delicate than Harry remembered him having. Malfoy sneered and turned towards a large cabinet made of sturdy dark wood and carved with the most intricate swirls and curlicues, an object that seemed far out of place in a shop like Borgin’s. Harry was too distracted by a gibbering whisper coming from the dismembered goblin head on a display stand directly behind him to hear what Malfoy had been saying as the other boy kept his voice soft, and he struggled around the tangle of the Cloak around his ankles for a bit to creep closer.

“…know how to fix it?”

Harry frowned. There was really something strange about Malfoy as he stared at the hunched line of his shoulders, the very faint quiver of the tense line of his back. His voice sounded strange.

“I will have to see it,” Borgin said. “Perhaps if you bring it here, I would be able to take a look.”

Malfoy shook his head. “No, it needs to stay put. I just need you to tell me how to do it.”

“Well, without seeing it, that would be a very difficult job. Perhaps even impossible.”

Malfoy snaked up, the tenseness Harry saw in his posture almost completely gone. He couldn’t see what it was Malfoy was doing but he was holding something up to Borgin’s face.

“Perhaps this will make you more confident,” he hissed. Borgin licked his lips nervously, expression clearly spooked, and Malfoy went on, his voice relentless, implacable. “Tell anyone and there will be retribution. You know Fenrir Greyback? He’s a family friend, and he’ll be by from time to time to make sure you’re giving this problem your full attention.”

“I—I’m sure there’ll be no need—“

“I’ll be the one to decide that,” Malfoy said and he nodded his head, as if in dismissal of the shopkeeper. “And remember, Mr. Borgin, not a word to anyone, least of all my mother.”

“Of course,” Borgin agreed. “And what about the other one? Perhaps you’d like for me to package it now?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Malfoy sneered. “I wouldn’t walk around carrying that. Just don’t sell it.”

“Of course not, sir.”

Borgin made a deep bow, the same that Harry had seen him give Lucius Malfoy several years ago, and he wondered what it was that had frightened the proud shopkeeper into suddenly treating Malfoy with a kind of deference that someone dangerous was afforded. Malfoy nodded again and then he marched back to the door of the shop looking entirely pleased with himself, an expression that once Harry would have liked to punch out of his face, but with how strangely young he looked now that Harry was a good three inches taller than him, only made him look… Harry tried to search for a word to describe Malfoy’s face, and the only one he could really come up with was _pretty_. Which was weird. It was _Malfoy_ , there was just nothing attractive about the poncy git that he was all the time.

Harry quickly made his way to trail after Malfoy as he stepped out of the shop and speed walked back to the robe shop. Harry didn’t bother following him as he went to fetch his mother. There was no time to do so anyway as Ron, Ginny, Hermione, and Mr and Mrs Weasley emerged out of the twins’ joke shop, looking around for him. Harry rounded behind Mrs Weasley, whose back was to the wall, and was facing Ron and Hermione only, and slipped quietly out of his Cloak.

“There you are, Harry!” Ron exclaimed, his voice dripping with false exasperation as Harry quickly stuffed his Cloak into his bag before anyone else noticed. He shook his head minutely, mouthing “Later!” before Ron could open his mouth again to ask him questions.

The three of them hung back as Mrs Weasley declared that they should all move to Flourish and Blotts to get their required reading. Harry allowed Ginny and her parents to wander further into the shop, letting the low burble of chatter from the sparse group of other shoppers milling through the shelves to cover his voice as he told Ron and Hermione what he had seen Malfoy do.

“He’s up to something,” he concluded, just as Hermione piled two copies of the 6 th year Transfiguration text into Harry’s outstretched arms. Ron would be using Percy’s old book, a full two versions behind the current one, though nothing quite so different than the new copies that Harry and Hermione were going to buy.

Ron nodded as Hermione sifted through a couple of other optional texts. “Malfoy’s always up to something. Wouldn’t surprise me if he’d gotten up to the same Dark magic his father’s always been known to dabble in.”

Hermione scowled at him. “How would you know that? I hardly think Mr. Malfoy would truly be teaching Draco any of the things he’d gotten up to in the Department of Mysteries. Malfoy was just as surprised as everyone else when he heard his dad had been rounded up with the other Death Eaters.”

“No, Hermione, Ron’s right,” Harry said. “For all we know, Malfoy could be working on the same Dark magic as his dad. Why else would he go to Borgin and Burke?”

Hermione harrumphed in almost the same exact impatient way Harry had seen Mrs Weasley do when dealing with the twins. “Well, seeing as how their good name’s been tarnished, I hardly think Malfoy would want to deal with many of the shopkeepers who are now too afraid of him and his family, now that his father has been proven to be a Death Eater and sent to Azkaban, right?”

“You don’t know that,” Harry muttered incredulously. “Madam Malkin was just fine serving him and his stuck-up mother if they hadn’t made such a huge fuss about Malfoy getting fitted.” He and Ron sniggered. “Especially since it looks like he hasn’t even grown a half inch from last term.”

Hermione scowled even deeper at them and grabbed the books she’d piled on Harry and dumped them back onto the shelves. “Oh, fine. If you really wanted to find out, let’s go over there now and see what it was Malfoy really wanted from Borgin. Maybe then you’d leave him alone.”

Harry wanted to protest that he wasn’t being unnecessarily suspicious of Malfoy because, well, it was Malfoy, and Malfoy had always had some diabolical plan to ruin Harry’s life, and with the way Borgin had been so disturbed by what Malfoy had shown him, Harry would have bet it had to have been something associated with Voldemort to have spooked the shopkeeper like so. Maybe Malfoy even had the Dark Mark.

“Fine,” he said, craning his head to check that Mr and Mrs Weasley were still busy picking out things for Ginny, before beckoning Ron and Hermione out of the shop. “Let’s.”

His face was too well-known for him to enter a Knockturn Alley shop without being recognized, and Ron’s hair marked him very quickly as someone who would never truly dabble in the Dark Arts, the sort that Borgin’s shop was known very well for, so Hermione was the one who marked to the shop door. Ron fished from his pockets a pair of Extendable ears and he and Harry hunkered at the side of the shop entrance, keeping away from the glass window displays, and settled to listen.

Hermione marched to the counter, where Borgin appeared to be counting Galleons from his till. Hermione smiled cheerily as she approached.

“Horrible day, isn’t it?” Borgin eyed her suspiciously as she looked around the shop, and spotted the necklace Harry had seen. “Is this necklace for sale?”

“If you have one and a half thousand Galleons,” Borgin replied coldly.

Hermione hummed and turned to another display nearer to the back of the shop where Malfoy had stood and threatened Borgin. “And what about this, um, skull? How much is it?”

“Sixteen Galleons.”

“So it’s for sale then? It’s not—not being held for anyone?”

Borgin apparently knew what what she was up to and was not in the mood for any funny business. “If you will make no purchase, I suggest you leave.” When Hermione hung back for a bit more, he yelled, “Get out!”

He slammed the door quite rudely behind Hermione and slapped the sign of the shop “Closed” before peering suspiciously out the glass display windows and then spelling them shut. 

Ron and Harry had luckily crouched in the opposite direction he’d looked and he hadn’t spotted them. Hermione hurried to where they stood, not daring to look back in case Brogin was still at the windows.

“That could’ve gone a bit better,” said Ron. “You were a bit too obvious—“

“Well next time, we should see how you would have handled it, Master of of Mystery,” Hermione snapped shrilly.

Harry sighed as the three of them hurried back to Flourish and Blotts to finish their shopping before Mr and Mrs Weasley noticed they were gone. It looked like they were going to find nothing about what Malfoy was up to just yet, so he did his best to put the suspicious boy out of his mind and concentrated on getting all of his books together lest he be on the other end of Hermione’s testy temper. She’d been such a nag lately, after they’d gotten their O.W.L.S. marks and Ron’s score of Acceptable in Potions, and Harry’s abysmal grade in Astronomy, that he was sure it was going to be a nightmare going back to school with her. He’d put Malfoy out of his mind. For now. Ron was right, anyway. Malfoy was always up to something, and that strange feeling Harry had around him that he couldn’t shake just convinced Harry even more. In any event, there was still time to find out what the other boy was up to even before classes started.

#

Draco was shaking as he finally allowed himself to sink down on against the window of the empty cabin. Mother had done her best to try to calm him, but there was no calming down after the… travesty… he had just been subjected to. That wasn’t the right word, because the right word impinged too much on his masculinity, hell on his human dignity, and his stomach wanted to turn over again if he tried to find a word to define what he had very narrowly escaped the morning before he left the Manor. It hadn’t been the first time either since the Others had always given him sidelong glances of that calculated estimation, even before he’d turned into _This_ , but it was the first that someone else had witnessed, the first that he had had to be rescued like a damsel in fucking distress.

He wasn’t sure that it helped that Aunt Bella had been the one who had seen, and not his mother. Well, perhaps it did. Mother didn’t need to know. Draco didn’t want her to learn that the moment her son had… changed… that he’d nearly been a defenseless wallflower in his own home. Aunt Bella had promised that she would never tell Mother, a promise Draco managed to extract from her as she’d nonchalantly tortured her own husband. Perhaps Aunt Bella relished the torture for more reasons than just that Rodolphus Lestrange had put his hands on his underage nephew. His nephew who was now a _girl_. Bellatrix had never really struck Draco as someone who had anything but a partnership with her husband insofar only as their loyalties lay in the Dark Lord. She’d always been too fanatically worshipful of the Dark Lord, so maybe it would not have been such a stretch that she could gleefully subject him to the Cruciatus Curse, and enjoy every minute, goaded Draco to take a similar enjoyment, as she watched her husband twist and convulse in agony.

Draco wasn’t sure which it was that revolted him more—the fact that he had nearly been sexually assaulted by someone he was related to, or the fact that he had been forced to watch someone else torture his tormentor. He hadn’t been hurt, Draco was certain he never would have been, not after he’d almost completely maimed Selwyn when he’d thought the older man had followed him from Mother’s solaire and into the kitchens. Draco had never had bouts of accidental magic, not since he was five, if his father was to be believed, but the blast that had ripped off a good chunk of flesh and bone from Selwyn’s hands wasn’t going to make Draco feel sorry for being unable to control his magic so well when cornered.

With his Uncle, though, that had been different. Rodolphus was not a stupid man thinking less with his brain and more with his prick. He knew about Selwyn, Draco surmised, and his wand was ready when he’d cornered him as he stepped out of Lucius’ study. The corridor was dark, and Lucius had kept most of the Death Eaters away from what he considered his private sanctuary. The space had always only ever been open to Draco and Narcissa. Draco’s guard had been down; he hadn’t expected to be attacked, and he hadn’t expected that anyone else besides Mother and Aunt Bella had known of his condition. But his Uncle knew, and he’d been ready with a rough hand and spells Draco did not know how to counter.

If perhaps Aunt Bella had not shown up, Draco’s accidental magic may have again burst forth, maybe in a manner far deadlier than what had befallen Selwyn, so maybe it truly had been a boon that Aunt Bella had helped.

That didn’t stop Draco from fleeing the scene, his body wracked by shudders of fear and revulsion. He _hated_ that now, more than ever, more than even the aftermath of Father being sent to Azkaban, he had become a target, a victim. And all because he was now stuck in this—this body that he never asked for.

Mother didn’t ask why Draco was shaking and flushed and out of breath when they met back in her sitting room, so that she could take him to King’s Cross. She had taken one look at his face and had soothed and cooed him the only way she knew how. It had even been mildly effective. Certainly, Draco didn’t think he would have been able to drag himself into the train long enough to find a compartment where he could stew at his own impotence in solitude. He wished he hadn’t been so abrupt with his farewells with his mother, but he couldn’t stop the shaking in his fingers, the quiver in his lips, not even now, it had been well over an hour since Aunt Bella had intervened. The presence of so many other people on the platform made him feel itchy under his skin, wary that there would be others who would look at him in that manner that made his skin feel slimy and disgusting, that manner that made him want to jump out of this body entirely and just—just… 

No, he clenched his fists and bit his lip to keep them from shaking. He was crying again. He’d been crying when Aunt Bella found him. No, he wasn’t going to think that. He had a mission, and Father relied too much on his success to be free of Azkaban. He knew Mother would never say so, but Draco wasn’t stupid. She relied on his success too for her continued safety in Malfoy Manor. He wasn’t going to be this repulsive little weakling that he was now. He wasn’t a damsel in distress. He was _not_ a victim.

The compartment door slammed open and Draco strained with the last bit of control over his strange new body not to jump at the sound. Pansy peered in, her face dripping with disdain until she recognized him, and he hastily shoved a fist across his cheeks to hid the evidence that he had been crying.

“What do you want?” he demanded. It was an effort to control his voice, keep it soft enough that she would not hear that it was half an octave higher than how he used to sound, keep it deep enough that he could project bravado he did not feel to drip from his words.

Pansy’s face, overly made up and snub-nosed, broke into a happy smile, the first genuine one that he had seen since his summer in hell. “There you are, Draco. When Vince and Greg showed up without you, I’d thought for sure that you weren’t coming back. Greg said you might not need to, you know. His father’s been telling him things.”

Once again, Draco struggled to school his reactions to one of bland interest instead of the terror he felt at the first hint that anyone besides his mother and aunt, and his uncle Rody, knew of what had befallen him after his Marking. But no, he didn’t think he’d seen Crabbe or Goyle’s fathers since the day the Dark Lord had actually taken his wand to Draco’s left arm, and he didn’t think, after the way Aunt Bella had tortured her husband, that Rodolphus Lestrange would have told any of the other Death Eaters that frequented the manor anything at all of how Draco had changed.

He scrambled to his feet, not giving Pansy any hint of an answer as he hustled her out of the compartment. “Come on. Prefects meeting in the first carriage should be starting soon.”

Pansy didn’t say anymore and allowed him to lead the way. The other Prefects were already there. Draco ignored Weasley and the Mudblood as they stood in the other side of the compartment, as the Head Boy and Head Girl gave them a stern talking-to, a reminder of their Prefect responsibilities, and nonsense Draco was no longer interested in. He had bigger problems than any of these insipid idiots could ever hope to comprehend. 

His mission was foremost on his mind, but behind that, he worried that perhaps he needed to come clean to some of his housemates about his condition. He hadn’t seen or spoken to anyone besides Pansy yet, and Pansy was dumb as a brick and wouldn’t even guess that anything was amiss with him, but Draco knew it was only a matter of time before Blaise, or worse, Theo suspected his change.

It didn’t help that Theo and he had had a… misunderstanding of sorts before fifth year had ended. Draco had been distraught over his father’s imprisonment, and hadn’t been thinking very clearly then, and Theo was just there, he hadn’t said anything when Draco had ranted and raved, but there had been something in his eyes when Draco had turned to look at him with an expression he’d been ashamed to realize was tear-streaked helplessness. Theo hadn’t said anything when Draco tried to kiss him after, but Draco hadn’t liked the look in his eye when he’d turned Draco away.

The meeting ended and Pansy dragged Draco through the train in search of their friends. They found Theo sitting stern and silent, while Daphne gossiped and giggled with Tracy across from him. Pansy waltzed into the compartment easily, shoving the two girls apart to sit between them so that she would be the center of the discussion like the gossip queen she liked to pretend she was. Theo looked up from the book he was reading to regard Draco with his usual silent intensity.

Draco almost fled. It was a near thing, so fearful was he of disclosing what he had become, so frightened that they would use this thing against him, like he’d done to them many times when he’d discovered some hidden secret of theirs and he wanted power over them. Telling them now… it would give away too much of the fragile power he held for himself since the Marking, and he didn’t think he could do it, but he saw Granger and Weasley marching down the aisle, and Draco hurried into the cabin and shut the door behind him.

Theo lifted a curious brow as Draco hastily sat himself beside him, keeping his hands clenched on his lap to prevent them from shaking.

“Something wrong, Draco?” he murmured, quietly enough that only Draco could hear.

His eyes darted to meet Theo’s pale blue gaze, flat and secretive, and Draco fully lost his nerve and shook his head.

Theo put his book away and turned bodily to face him fully. He frowned. 

Draco opened his mouth and then he knew. He knew if he spoke, no matter how soft or well-modulated he made his voice to make it sound deep and masculine, that Theo would know. He’d know and who knew what he would do with that knowledge? What if…. Draco had fancied the pants off Theo from the time they were eight and Nott Sr had taken to bringing his son around to Malfoy Manor when Lucius thought boys would be a more appropriate playmate for his son, who was now growing into manhood. He knew Theo had never liked him back, not really, and that mess of a kiss Draco had tried to push on him last term had solidified that feeling into fact. What if Theo, like all of the Death Eaters who strutted around the manor now that Draco’s father was no longer around, used _this_ against him to get the Dark Lord’s favor for his own father? What if, and Draco wasn’t sure how he felt about this thought entirely given that he’d always fancied Theo, he attacked Draco the way Uncle Rody had done just this morning? There would be no Aunt Bella in the Slytherin common room to protect his virtue.

Pansy had stopped talking the moment she realized Draco had not joined her in gossiping with Tracy and Daphne and turned now to the two boys in the cabin, her expression curious at first, and then dripping with concern as she looked at Draco’s pale face, the bloodless lip he bit to keep it from quivering nervously, and at Theo’s expectant expression.

“What’s going on?” she demanded, before she made a dismissive gesture to shut Daphne up when she attempted to repeat the juicy piece of gossip about Harper and her sister.

Draco wanted to open his mouth and tell them everything but he felt trapped by the presence of the two other girls, people he got along with well enough but didn’t entirely trust, and with the intensity with which Theo regarded him. He was only saved from having to answer immediately by the door flying open and Blaise folded himself into the cabin elegantly, sweeping next to Tracy. Pansy snapped a finger at the two girls and pointed outside. Daphne looked hurt for a moment, but she and Tracy obligingly excused themselves from the compartment. Blaise reached to close the compartment door but now it appeared stuck.

“What’s wrong with this thing?” he muttered as he repeatedly tried to slam the door closed, and was repeatedly thwarted.

“Leave it,” said Theo quietly. “No one’s going to hear.”

Draco did his best to try to regain his composure. He jumped at every little sound or movement he could hear about the sounds of the train chugging along on the tracks, and he thought for a fleeting moment he saw something black and shiny flash on the floor before Daphne closed the compartment door behind her, but it was probably only the product of his overactive imagination. He was completely overwrought with fear and now even his friends could tell that something was not entirely right with him.

“I—“

Blaise leaned forward, his expression still cool, but the chocolate brown of his eyes tinged with a sliver of worry. “Draco, are you quite all right? You look like you’re going to pass out.”

“Something happened,” he whispered finally. He could no longer stop his hands from shaking so he clutched into the material of his robes to keep himself from fidgeting. His fingers felt strained and raw from constantly being clenched, like the muscles would lock into place and never be right. Pansy noticed immediately and she shoved Theo away from the almost uncomfortable nearness that he had with Draco, and plopped herself beside him, took his hands from his robes and smoothed them out finger by finger.

“Draco, you’re shaking,” she said quietly, as she held his hands between hers. Draco was only very dimply aware that with this body, his and Pansy’s hands were about the same size, held the same delicate quality. “Tell us about it. We’ll help.”

Draco didn’t think Blaise or Theo would have agreed, but Blaise gave a cool nod, and Theo, if anything, was even more intense in his silence.

“I—Something happened to me, this summer,” he stammered, and struggled to find the words to make them understand, without having to tell them outright. “I think… if things go well, I might not even have to go back to Hogwarts after Christmas.”

Pansy gasped dramatically, because that was what she did, and for a moment, Draco was fondly glad that she was his friend. Blaise waited patiently, and Theo leaned forward, almost hovering over Pansy.

Draco kept his voice soft to keep the hysteria he was feeling from creeping into the sound of his voice and giving himself away. “It’s to do with my father—“

“I heard,” Theo interrupted. “So you have it, then? _He_ gave it to you?”

Draco stared at him wildly, fear oozing out of his pores and making bile rush up his throat. When he next opened his mouth, it was not to confirm or deny that he had indeed been given the Dark Mark. When he found his voice, the words that poured out instead was the truth, for nothing could have hidden the fact that he was now a woman from the high pitched hysterical sob that escaped his throat.

Haltingly, he told them about the pain he endured after the Marking, and how Professor Snape had visited and tried what he could, but ultimately failed to bring him out of the agonizing magical coma, how, as his mother later explained to him when he woke, it was Aunt Bella who had sized into his mind to release him of the pain, how undoing it had caused this peculiar transformation, and how Draco thought it may have come about from a spell cast on him before he had even been out of his mother’s womb.

His friends listened in rapt attention. Draco couldn’t stop himself from telling them of the paralyzing fear he’d felt when he’d first woken up, the hatred and revulsion he had for himself when he discovered what he’d become, and then, finally, the shameful humiliation when he had been cornered in his own him and had to be rescued by his crazy aunt. He did _not_ tell them about his mission, though. That was something he needed to keep for himself, lest anyone try to stop him from securing his family’s safety and freedom.

Pansy was in tears by the time he’d finished speaking. Blaise stared at him, his face betraying nothing, but his eyes unable to hide the horror with which he regarded this new Draco now. Theo looked as if he understood though, and Draco knew it hadn’t been a mistake to tell him. Pansy and Blaise were good friends, but they did not understand his predicament the way Theo did. Their parents, while sympathizing with the Dark Lord’s cause, were not Death Eaters, and so they would not be under the same suspicion Draco and theo would have been the minute they stepped into the school. Moreover, Pansy and Blaise were not of pure enough blood descent that they would have understood the spell that had brought all of this turmoil about in the first place. Changing the sex of a child did not matter if the family did not have a legacy to preserve, the way the Notts and the Malfoys did.

“Have you told this to Professor Snape?” Pansy asked timidly, still holding carefully onto Draco’s hands. 

Now that his tale was told, he found he no longer needed to cry, but the tremor in his fingers still would not stop. “I don’t know if I can trust him. Aunt Bella doesn’t.”

“You’d have to, eventually, though,” Blaise said quietly. “You maybe can fool others in the school by way of glamours or changing your voice to sound deeper than it actually is, but…”

“Professor Snape would help us,” Pansy finished for him.

Draco wanted to say something, some scathing remark Aunt Bella had told him about their Head of House, but Theo caught his eye and nodded.

“No, Draco is right. No one else must know.” He turned his pale blue gaze at Pansy when she looked like she was about to protest. “He’s already been attacked once, and in his own home. If anyone else were to find out… who knows what they’d do to him.”

Blaise regarded the dark-haired boy coolly. “If I didn’t know any better, Theo, I would have thought that sounded like a threat.”

“Take of it what you will,” Theo replied. He stood. “We’re here.”

Draco realized belatedly that he was right. The train had already stopped moving, and he could hear the bustle of students moving out of the compartments and out into the station outside. Theo nodded at him, once, and then swept past to step out. Blaise stared after Theo for a moment, his expression unreadable, before he nodded to Draco as well in silent commiseration, and followed Theo.

Pansy squeezed his hands. “It’ll be okay, Draco. Professor Snape will help.” Her words were soft, meant to be reassuring, but Draco could only feel fear.

When he didn’t move, she pressed a steady hand to his cheek, smiled that reassuring smile that made him wonder for a moment why he couldn’t feel the same confidence she had in his situation, and in her confidence with their Head of House, before she stood too and left. 

He would have followed her had he not tracked the sudden, minute movement he saw at the foot of the compartment, near where Theo and Daphne’s trunks where stored. He thought for a moment of that same flash of movement he’d seen when Daphne and Tracy had left the cabin, and his hand darted out.

He wasn’t surprised when he felt fabric when there was none, and he uncovered the hidden voyeur. Potter was crouched at the corner of the cabin, next to the door. Draco could feel all the blood leaving his face. He’d heard everything. _Everything_.

The cold fury that pierced him was nothing like he’d ever felt before, and for a moment, he wondered if this was how his mother had felt when she saw him transforming before her eyes after his aunt’s magic left his mind. It galvanized him into action that only Potter could ever inspire.

“ _Petrificus Totalus!_ ”

Potter’s whole body went rigid in the absurdly cramped curled position he was still in on the floor. Draco smiled nastily.

“I thought so. You think I didn’t see you when you tried to slip in after Daphne left?” He smirked. “That was you blocking the door when Blaise tried to close it, I suppose?”

Potter did nothing but stare at him with terror in his eyes. 

“You heard _nothing_ of consequence, Potter,” Draco hissed in his ear before he straightened. “But while I have you here—“ He stomped at Potter’s face, the crack that filled the still air in the cabin like music to his ears.”That’s from my father. Now let’s see…”

He smiled again to himself, almost unpleasantly, as he tugged the Invisibility Cloak Potter had been wearing rom under him and threw it over him.

“I don’t reckon they’ll find you ’til the train’s back in London,” he said quietly. “By then, there’ll be no one for you to tell whatever you’d discovered. See you around, Potter—or not.”

He took care to step and break on Potter’s fingers before he stepped out of the compartment. Oddly, he could feel a spring in his step already, having one-upped his rival. Perhaps his year was not going to be such a nightmare without Saint Potter to ruin his plans.

#

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Please tell me what you think. And tell me if I'm being pedantic and repetitive. Because I feel like I'm being pedantic and repetitive.


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